Fixing Melee Regeneration set

[Troo]

3 minutes ago, WindDemon21 said:

insanely benefit

 

There is no 'insanely benefit' there are tradeoffs and balance.

 

It would be simpler, at least to me, to create a 'New Regeneration' power set if there is enough interest rather than re-working an existing popular power set.

[MTeague]

The only changes @WindDemon21 has proposed that I'm on board with is strongly increasing Regen's resistance to Regen/Recharge debuffs. The rest, I've simply "Nope, I can't get on board with that", and I'm not arguing it back and forth because it's clear he and I both have strongly held opinions and neither one of us is going to budge on it.

 

That said, I do not begrudge him the right to the make the suggestion and to argue for changes he thinks are needed, even if I'm looking at them saying "No, my /Regen characters wreck face out of gate, they're fine".

 

I do think what is getting under people's skin is the assumption/statement that "everyone agrees with this".

[WindDemon21]

1 minute ago, Troo said:

 

There is no 'insanely benefit' there are tradeoffs and balance.

 

It would be simpler, at least to me, to create a 'New Regeneration' power set if there is enough interest rather than re-working an existing popular power set.

It would actually if you realize how regen plays with the other powers. And it's not a whole rework, i've listed a bunch of ideas, but the main one changing recon to absorb WOULD greatly benefit the set.

[WindDemon21]

1 minute ago, MTeague said:

The only changes @WindDemon21 has proposed that I'm on board with is strongly increasing Regen's resistance to Regen/Recharge debuffs. The rest, I've simply "Nope, I can't get on board with that", and I'm not arguing it back and forth because it's clear he and I both have strongly held opinions and neither one of us is going to budge on it.

 

That said, I do not begrudge him the right to the make the suggestion and to argue for changes he thinks are needed, even if I'm looking at them saying "No, my /Regen characters wreck face out of gate, they're fine".

 

I do think what is getting under people's skin is the assumption/statement that "everyone agrees with this".

That might be, but outside of theme, which given sent regen the devs clearly see as appropriate anyway, there would be no negative downsides to recon being absorb, only a benefit, so not sure why people are getting their panties in a bunch. And I don't believe i said 'everyone agrees' but many upon many that I've talked with do. You may think it's fine, great, but lots don't, and this would only help it out.

[Troo]

13 minutes ago, WindDemon21 said:

It would actually if you realize how regen plays with the other powers

Sadly no.

Regeneration is the knifes edge and as such very challenging to 'improve' without overpowering. As shown in recent changes, overpowered is not what the HC team is shooting for. That means for each improvement there would likely need to be some form of trade off. This is how it works.

 

Regens can solo ITFs at max diff currently.

(folks who have can do it with many powersets, so don't think I'm pointing to regeneration as being the best or superior. **please don't nerf me.. again)

Edited April 27, 2021 by Troo

[WindDemon21]

Just now, Troo said:

Sadly no.

Regeneration is the knifes edge and as such very challenging to 'improve' without overpowering. As shown in recent changes, overpowered is not what the HC team is shooting for.

 

Regens can solo ITFs at max diff currently.

(folks who have can do it with many powersets, so don't think I'm pointing to regeneration as being the best or superior. **please don't nerf me.. again)

Even with absorb, it would be better but nowhere near overpowered. Offereing zero base defense outside of the very short MOG, and likewise very little resistance, that would never be possible. (without toggle IH again of course)

[WindDemon21]

5 minutes ago, Troo said:

Sadly no.

Regeneration is the knifes edge and as such very challenging to 'improve' without overpowering. As shown in recent changes, overpowered is not what the HC team is shooting for.

 

Regens can solo ITFs at max diff currently.

(folks who have can do it with many powersets, so don't think I'm pointing to regeneration as being the best or superior. **please don't nerf me.. again)

Effectively, what it would do as absorb would help with alpha strikes, and when it's up, would actually allow your other regen you have to heal you, instead of being wasted once you reach healed, and as you take more hits would continue to do the same, otherwise, outside of IH, if you're relying on constantly reconstructing as a heal, fast healing and integrations regen gets largely unnoticed as well, and really only shows in that 15s MOG window. Having it be absorb would help alleviate this issue, still stay in theme, and help level progression by a very large amount.

[Leogunner]

1 hour ago, arcane said:

I’ll acknowledge it plays differently due to requiring regular clicks, but that’s all I’m ready to admit at the moment. I’m certainly not faceplanting where my other brutes aren’t, but I am less able to just totally AFK mid-fight, yes.

You still can.  Just die, go AFK, come back and hit Revive.

[arcane]

Too true, but I never take a self rez on a melee character because they don’t tend to die.

[Replacement]

I keep seeing people conflate parity with peak performance (usually in a grossly nonrepresentative edge case).

 

It's true: there are some fringe benefits to Regen with the correct settings, builds, and outside buffs.

 

But pound-for-pound, case by case, Regen is bad and needs a rework.

 

We see these threads every week for a reason: people can feel it. That amount of subjective "something is off" likely doesn't mean you're somehow amazing if you don't notice it - it probably means you started your character at 50 fully-slotted.

 

Parity means that across the level bands, playstyles and competencies, and assorted activities, Regen should at least be in the same ballpark as other sets for performance, even if it requires a different gameplay loop (cycling clicks) to get there.

 

Saying something like "Regen is fine because I have Superior Winter sets and permahasten" is like saying "Regen is fine because of i4 Hamidon."  It doesn't change the facts for the rest of the game or its players.

 

----

 

One concept I want to convey is the difference between mitigation and sustain.

 

Mitigation is tactical in nature - "how will I survive this fight?"  This is simply about ensuring your incoming damage is lower than your kill speed.

 

Sustain trends towards more strategic - "how do I make sure I'm ready for the next fight?" It's about how much is left in the tank at the end of the fight, and how much of it will be back by the time of your next engagement.

 

This delineation is very easy to see at play in games without passive regeneration on every character, but it still exists in CoH.

 

Regen is almost entirely based on Sustain, and that is why it's been nerfed for years: if your ability to sustain yourself gets so good that it also functions as mitigation (undoing damage as soon as it comes in), you will always live in a binary "I am either invincible or dead" state, which developers tend to hate for reasons this post is already too long to go into.

 

I am aware a lot of people would be skeptical of this difference mattering - that we have solved Endurance and every melee has enough heal procs going off to keep them topped off between fights - but I think it goes a long way to explain my first point about the lack of parity in the set's performance:

Regen cannot out-heal incoming damage in most of the standard play experience, including most content. 

And then one day you crest that hill of performance and suddenly nothing can kill you, because you Sustain straight through it.

 

PS: this post supports the notion that top-end Regen is actually awesome, but I don't actually believe that either. There are 3-4 "usual suspect" armor sets that offer more mitigation tools all the time, and just get multiplied with IOs, along with enough Sustain to make Instant Healing spikes irrelevant.

[arcane]

I will submit that I am no expert at pre-50 content and that regen may very well need a buff that helps with those levels. Once you’re 50 and have all of the click tools? No, I don’t think it needs to be any stronger there. 
 

And also note that I am a big critic of the soft-cap-or-die meta because I like procs and offense better - I promise you my regen has nothing like that capped 😉

Edited April 28, 2021 by arcane

[Mr Pierce]

On 4/26/2021 at 6:38 PM, Mr Pierce said:

I had always thought that giving Regen an "overheal" mechanic would be really neat. Essentially once you're at full health, any and all regen you have is converted into an absorb shield. It would require a maximum, probably somewhere in the neighborhood of 20-30% depending on the AT.

No one liked my overheal idea?

[WindDemon21]

21 minutes ago, Mr Pierce said:

No one liked my overheal idea?

No cause that already assumes you're at full health most of the time where it wouldn't be needed. The point of having reconstruction being absorb is so you can block damage letting the rest of your regen powers actually do their job rather than "instantly full health, other regen is doing literally nothing now."

[Naraka]

1 hour ago, Replacement said:

...

 

But pound-for-pound, case by case, Regen is bad and needs a rework.

 

We see these threads every week for a reason: people can feel it. That amount of subjective "something is off" likely doesn't mean you're somehow amazing if you don't notice it - it probably means you started your character at 50 fully-slotted.

 

Parity means that across the level bands, playstyles and competencies, and assorted activities, Regen should at least be in the same ballpark as other sets for performance, even if it requires a different gameplay loop (cycling clicks) to get there.

 

Saying something like "Regen is fine because I have Superior Winter sets and permahasten" is like saying "Regen is fine because of i4 Hamidon."  It doesn't change the facts for the rest of the game or its players.

...

 

I have other counter arguments to this and some other points made in the thread but I'll only respond again with my main one since others can engage the talking points if they choose:

 

How much of the disparity you're observing is actual necessity and how much is due to the expectations you have of the new and improved ATs and sets and IOs and other conveniences? Because I'm personally not arguing you can't throw a bone to the set, but rather you don't need to throw a whole chicken dinner at it just because of a perceived handicap of that others view as a playstyle. 

 

Considering the vast amount of sets one can pick from and the custom colors and animations to set them to, parity is mostly a pipedream that has spiraled the game ever closer to boredom.

 

25 minutes ago, WindDemon21 said:

No cause that already assumes you're at full health most of the time where it wouldn't be needed. The point of having reconstruction being absorb is so you can block damage letting the rest of your regen powers actually do their job rather than "instantly full health, other regen is doing literally nothing now."

 

I think the main tactic to such a change wouldn't be trying to get the absorb mid-combat but rather overclocking while out of combat.

[Steampunkette]

1 hour ago, Mr Pierce said:

No one liked my overheal idea?

 

For two reasons. The first is as follows:

 

37 minutes ago, WindDemon21 said:

No cause that already assumes you're at full health most of the time where it wouldn't be needed. The point of having reconstruction being absorb is so you can block damage letting the rest of your regen powers actually do their job rather than "instantly full health, other regen is doing literally nothing now."

 

And the second is: The game has no way to track "Overhealing". It's just not something the engine does. When you're healed, you gain X amount of hit points. If you're at the cap, you gain X amount of hit points but nothing happens. It still just tries to give you those hit points and a separate function keeps them from applying beyond a certain point. It doesn't actively track how much was or wasn't applied.

 

 

[Replacement]

4 hours ago, Naraka said:

How much of the disparity you're observing is actual necessity and how much is due to the expectations you have of the new and improved ATs and sets and IOs and other conveniences? Because I'm personally not arguing you can't throw a bone to the set, but rather you don't need to throw a whole chicken dinner at it just because of a perceived handicap of that others view as a playstyle. 

 

Considering the vast amount of sets one can pick from and the custom colors and animations to set them to, parity is mostly a pipedream that has spiraled the game ever closer to boredom.

To the first paragraph, simple test:

Make 2 toons. One Invulnerability, one Regen. Same AT. Get them to 25ish and throw on basic IOs.

Run them through the first few missions of Citadel. Get a feeling for how much time you spend waiting between fights for one of your Clicks to be ready with Regen.

 

I have done things like this.  In fact, when I first came to Homecoming, I didn't know or had forgotten Regen was bad. And then I did this with one of the Posi TFs. Yeah, those are so low level that they aren't terribly meaningful, but the difference was still vast enough that it prompted me to start comparing numbers.

 

To the second paragraph I left in the quote:

Parity is not sameness. Parity is about expectation.

You expect blasters to deal damage.

You expect tankers to have mez protection.

 

Etc etc. I expect regen to protect me if I've chosen it as my Armor set.

 

One clarification: I do not think all of regen needs tossed out and redone.  That was poorly worded on my part.  But if these high-end zomg builds really are too good to buff, then we should expect some take with our give. Honestly I hope not.

[BrandX]

I got to wondering if the idea of giving Regen lots of debuff resistance would be the way to go with it.  Recharge/Regeneration/Defense/ToHit Debuff resistance!

 

Though, I also thought Psi resist should be added to Resilience and MoG.  Also more Toxic resist.

[Troo]

@Replacement I'll consider taking that challenge. As my experience is highly slanted toward Regeneration on a Stalker, I'll give it a go on Brutes.

 

I believe that the different playstyle that Regeneration presents does not translate well to some players for a number of reasons.

• It is gonna get hit, this is the devils bargain.
• It is click heavy and as such can impact DPS.
• It is not a defensive set.
  • It is actually more similar to resistance sets.
  • Some folks struggle with pure resist options and tend to try for the 'safe place' that is defensive softcaps.
• It takes timing. As well as some thought or sense of tradeoffs regarding 'if I do this, I will not be able to do that for X amount of time'

 

The closest example where a common misconception or disconnect exists, to me at least, is Dark Armor and trying to run all the toggles at once. There are trade offs and some situational awareness that folks miss sometimes.

 

@BrandX toxic resist does exist for Regeneration. (some in Reconstruction & Resilience)

Edited April 28, 2021 by Troo

[Yomo Kimyata]

I'm not going to begrudge anyone their opinion, but mine is that regeneration doesn't require a rework.  If you want a regen-like experience that may be easier for your playstyle, I'd suggest trying bio armor or willpower.

[Koopak]

3 hours ago, Troo said:

I believe that the different playstyle that Regeneration presents does not translate well to some players for a number of reasons.

• It is gonna get hit, this is the devils bargain.
• It is click heavy and as such can impact DPS.
• It is not a defensive set.
  • It is actually more similar to resistance sets.
  • Some folks struggle with pure resist options and tend to try for the 'safe place' that is defensive softcaps.
• It takes timing. As well as some thought or sense of tradeoffs regarding 'if I do this, I will not be able to do that for X amount of time'

As someone who has played regen scrappers as 90% of their play time since day one of beta? This is my experience. Regen is NOT bad. However...

It is a touch subpar, but not in the way i see most people seem to think. Granted this is all the opinion of one asshole (me) who thinks he knows better just because hes played the same power set for years on years (admittedly almost all scrapper) but hear me out. Regen is a reactive set, that is it depends on the player reacting to the situation and using their clickies at the right times. This is actually why Reconstruction is fine as is, its for recovering from big hits or alphas or just adding some extra regen (in function by dividing the heal over the recharge time). I've personally used it to sustain me through some rough fights and I would NEVER give it up.

(edit: I also personally kinda hate all the suggested Dull Pain changes, Dull Pain doubles as another heal in addition to max hp, and your hp/s is derived from your max hp, so any change that reduces Dull Pain results in less hp/s and in the case of the proposed 1/2 max hp 1/2 absorb i think thats misguided because as is its very easy to hit the hp cap with no heal slotting in Dull Pain, so 1/2 max hp would actually be a HUGE buff, as you could, with a little slotting change, get the absorb essentially for free (Sorry @Steampunkette, you know i love you.) Obviously some different numbers could be considered though)

So how is regen subpar? Its not durability, or at least if it is its by a minor amount that I feel is solved by the suggested -regen -recharge resistances. (i build for -recharge resist as it is). No the issue is how it hurts your damage output as Troo points out. So id suggest the debuff resistances yes, but id also suggest some innate +recharge. This is actually reflected in changes made to the set on other servers, and while i disagree with MOST of those other changes, the recharge would go a ways to helping compensate for the DPS lost from casting survivals.

The only other change id suggest is maybe moving some of the durability into earlier powers, or adding some odd ball level scaling, but really i already am able to make a regen scrapper as tanky as most brutes at sub 30 so its not a big issue, just a way to make less experienced players of the set have an easier time as they get to grips with it.

 

 

3 hours ago, America's Angel said:

Hey @WindDemon21, If you're having trouble playing regen, then I suggest asking for advice on the relevant forums:

Brute: https://forums.homecomingservers.com/forum/22-brute/

Scrapper: https://forums.homecomingservers.com/forum/15-scrapper/

Sentinel: https://forums.homecomingservers.com/forum/25-sentinel/
Stalker: https://forums.homecomingservers.com/forum/20-stalker/

You can also find people to help in the atBuilds channel in the Homecoming Discord: https://discord.gg/wU7TEpXK

If you're on Everlasting, the Shaderaids discord has a few good regen players who can help you: https://discord.gg/Y2ffsjyt

Damn... why you gotta do him like that? Even MoG doesn't provide enough mitigation for that crit! (All seriousness i assume you didn't mean it as an insult but that's how i initially took it 😛 )

Edited April 29, 2021 by Koopak

[WindDemon21]

3 hours ago, America's Angel said:

Hey @WindDemon21, If you're having trouble playing regen, then I suggest asking for advice on the relevant forums:

Brute: https://forums.homecomingservers.com/forum/22-brute/

Scrapper: https://forums.homecomingservers.com/forum/15-scrapper/

Sentinel: https://forums.homecomingservers.com/forum/25-sentinel/
Stalker: https://forums.homecomingservers.com/forum/20-stalker/

You can also find people to help in the atBuilds channel in the Homecoming Discord: https://discord.gg/wU7TEpXK

If you're on Everlasting, the Shaderaids discord has a few good regen players who can help you: https://discord.gg/Y2ffsjyt

Lol I never said I was having *trouble* with it, just that I said comparatively it's been sub-par for a while given how it also impacts your dps and has no actual resistances to really any bad debuffs as well.

 

Being mostly reactive, fine yeah, but the two MAIN issues this post was written about is, well really it should easily have that 95% -regen resist cap, I mean, it IS regen... but also to have reconstruction swapped to absorb. You can still use it EXACTLY the same way as you do now as a heal if you want, but you could use it preemptively as well, and when you DO use it reactively, it will actually let your other powers work WITH it rather than one or the other.

 

The other things I mentioned would definitely help it but I wouldn't hold my breath on those, but I will stand my ground on how much more enjoyable regen would be with recon as an absorb and having capped -regen resistance.

Edited April 29, 2021 by WindDemon21

[Koopak]

I really am not going to end up agreeing with you on giving Absorb to Recon, I'm not against absorb on Regen for any thematic reason, i just honest to god feel that would be noticeably more powerful and unnecessarily so. Reconstruction's limit of only healing damage you have taken makes using it optimally riskier. Absrob would remove that risk, and in doing so, make the power significantly stronger. I get thats your intent, we just disagree on its necessity.

[WindDemon21]

3 hours ago, Yomo Kimyata said:

I'm not going to begrudge anyone their opinion, but mine is that regeneration doesn't require a rework.  If you want a regen-like experience that may be easier for your playstyle, I'd suggest trying bio armor or willpower.

Full rework, no. Some tweaks yeah. I mentioned the two main things, the others are simply suggestions.

[WindDemon21]

9 minutes ago, Koopak said:

I really am not going to end up agreeing with you on giving Absorb to Recon, I'm not against absorb on Regen for any thematic reason, i just honest to god feel that would be noticeably more powerful and unnecessarily so. Reconstruction's limit of only healing damage you have taken makes using it optimally riskier. Absrob would remove that risk, and in doing so, make the power significantly stronger. I get thats your intent, we just disagree on its necessity.

I'm glad someone actually seems to understand the base nature of what my suggestion is for, but I far from feel that it would make it anywhere near overpowered. The main benefit would be that when you use it it would actually let your fast healing/integrations regen mean something rather than how it's mostly cast aside in most gameplay compared to the other main abilities in regen. In the majority of cases, it's healing would be "increased" simply by the amount that you regenerate from fh/integration while the absorb is up. With the same values as current reconstruction but as absorb, if enemies are tearing through your 50% heal, they'll still tear through the 50% absorb, and your health will still be lower, but plus small amount you would regenerate in that meantime, and would actually mean something during the time that say IH is up, outside of basically having no purpose as a heal during that time. As to thinking it's "not needed" people can say that all day, but i've talked with and seen enough people/posts who simply do not agree, so the main issue would be if the devs think it would be overpowering, as again there is clearly no thematic loss if you look at sentinels (and that absorb is basically another form of heal anyway).

[WindDemon21]

20 minutes ago, America's Angel said:

Oh, my mistake! "Give regen +absorb" is what every inexperienced player suggests when talking about regen. (And they usually don't even play the set!) I wrongly assumed that you were someone who doesn't play regen.

 

Usually, when people become experienced at playing regen, they recognize it is one of the better armour sets in the game. This is why you don't really see experienced players of regen making "here's how to fix regen" threads. They tend to know better.

Or it's something suggested by a VERY experienced player who also plays every other armor set and sees regents faults and where it can be improved to be more fun. Fun being the operative word, you can have a different view fine, but don't even begin to be condescending to things you don't understand. Your snarkiness does not prove any other point besides you simply being egregiously pompous and thinking people are stupid or inexperienced because they don't share the same view as you. Get off you moderately stubby horse it's embarrassing.

Edited April 29, 2021 by WindDemon21